United States-based payment platform Square is hiring cryptocurrency engineers and is offering to pay them in digital currency, according to a tweet published by Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey on March 20.
In the tweet, Dorsey announces that “Square is hiring 3–4 crypto engineers and one designer to work full-time on open source contributions to the Bitcoin/crypto ecosystem. Work from anywhere, report directly to me, and we can even pay you in Bitcoin!”
Dorsey further commented that the decision to pay employees in digital currency is based on the intention “to make the broader crypto ecosystem better,” thus contributing to the Bitcoin (BTC) community.
Dorsey also noted that this will be the first open source initiative independent from their business objectives as potentially hired engineers will entirely focus on “what’s best for the crypto community and individual economic empowerment, not on Square’s commercial interests.”
As previously reported, Square registered $166 million in annual Bitcoin revenue for 2018. The company achieved over $52 million in Bitcoin sales for Q4, surpassing Q3 by $9 million and Q2 by more than $15 million. However, clear profit from the Bitcoin operations, which involve Square’s consumer app Cash, remained low, as purchasing costs account for the vast majority of revenue.
Last month, Dorsey — a known Bitcoin advocate — again declared that he believes Bitcoin to be the Internet’s native currency:
“[Bitcoin] was something that was born on the internet, that was developed on the internet, that was tested on the internet…It is of the internet.”